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What is Altmetric?

Modified on: Thu, 25 Jan, 2018 at 12:32 PM

Altmetric is a part of the Digital Science group. Altmetric allows users to track and measure activity around academic research, pulling patterns and compelling stories from hundreds of thousands of online conversations each month. The Altmetric attention score is an article-level score, indicating the amount of online attention an article has received. Other tools from Altmetric include the Altmetric Explorer, used by Organisations around the world to track the impact of their research in almost real time. For more information please go to www.altmetric.com.

Where does the Altmetric information come from?

Altmetric track a unique range of online sources to capture the conversations relating to research outputs. These include public policy documents, mainstream media outlets, blogs, citations, online reference managers, wikipedia, social media, and more.

How is the Altmetric Attention Score calculated?

The Altmetric Attention Score is a value that indicates the amount of attention received by an article across the internet. Sources that are being tracked include the mass media, policy documents, scholarly blogs, wikipedia, open peer reviews, academic syllabi and a variety of social media, including Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. The diversity of the attention sources is represented by the mix of colors in the donut. The value is weighted according to how high profile the attention sources are: with news, blogs and policy papers ranking high, and social media much lower. The precise values can be found here.